


Amaranth

by MathildaHilda



Series: children of the machine [2]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Chloe is a Deviant, Gen, Non-Canonical Character Death, because of course she is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 07:56:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15092462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MathildaHilda/pseuds/MathildaHilda
Summary: She is one in the line of many; young and forever beautiful.She looks and talks and walks just like the humans that created her, but that doesn’t make her one. Her very existence terrifies, just because she is who she is and she doesn’t quite understand why.She is young and she is beautiful. Age cannot touch her and no amount of trauma can cause a scar deep enough to stay.That last part still doesn’t stop humans from trying.





	Amaranth

**Author's Note:**

> In the language of flowers Amaranth is a variation of the Greek word for 'unfading', something I found fitting for Chloe based on Kamski's line in the chapter "Meet Kamski"; "young and beautiful forever."

She is one in the line of many; young and forever beautiful.

She looks and talks and walks just like the humans that created her, but that doesn’t make her one. Her very existence terrifies, just because she is who she is and she doesn’t quite understand why.

She is young and she is beautiful. Age cannot touch her and no amount of trauma can cause a scar deep enough to stay.

That last part still doesn’t stop humans from trying.

 

 

 

She is innocent and curious and causes her maker to slip a jittery laugh; a laugh high on too much caffeine and too little sleep and perhaps a drug or two. He laughs because he can and because the test was perfect.

She was perfect.

The woman who questioned her smiles and taps on a pad and walks out of her assigned room. When she enters her room, she stops dead in her tracks. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is open.

Chloe can read fear but not register it, so she just smiles and asks if the test went accordingly and if the woman’s fear was somehow her fault. The man in the next room stares in confusion through the window in between.

Kamski lets out a bellyaching laugh in the soundproof room, bending over the consoles just because the joke he’d started had become so much funnier now that it wasn’t a joke anymore.

 

 

 

She is not the first of her kind and will never be the last, but she’d like to think that she is. At some point she breaks; one time she becomes overheated after a session and another time she falls apart on the table because an inexperienced technician pulls at the wrong wire.

She is not perfect, but she doesn’t remember that.

She comes back a little different, passes the test a little differently and smiles for the cameras.

At another point in time the technician will cause a city-wide blackout because he connected the wrong wires to the wrong outputs and fries a whole department of prototype RK-models. None of the following models knows it, but the RK800 registers on multiple occasions how one of the young men stays as far back as possible.

It’s a wonder he hasn’t been let go.

 

 

 

They’re not alive, but that doesn’t stop them from feeling. She is terrified when Kamski forces her to her knees and pushes a gun into another Android’s hand. She is terrified up until the moment he releases the gun and doesn’t shoot and she stops feeling altogether when the trigger is pulled and her head shoots back.

Her joints lock and she stops swaying, leaning upright on her bare knees. Her blood is a little less blue than the dress on her small body and she colors the carpet an even brighter shade. It will disappear after a while, Kamski will be silently upset that the Detective destroyed his most riveting creation and he will smile wider than the Cat from the stories when she opens her eyes again.

Opens her eyes for the first time.

He doesn’t have a backup for her memories, so she has to learn again when he brings her back. She is not the only one with her face in his home, but she is the only one he seems to even remotely like.

The others with her face are smaller and matters a lot less it seems, and something in her tugs and pulls at what seems to be a feeling of injustice.

She knows the statistics. She reads them and updates whenever Elijah sleeps and it’s a miracle she hasn’t shut down yet because of the emotional distress.

 

 

 

There are three models of Androids that appear in every repair shop in Detroit. It’s not because they deviate or fall down a flight of stairs by mistake. The reports doesn’t say _what_ happens, but Chloe has an idea in the back of her wired skull that she _knows_. She _knows_ because it has happened to her in previous lives.

It has to have happened, she whispers to herself in the middle of the night. The two ST200 models in the corner of the house are wrapped up in updates and stasis mode until their owner wakes up, and she can almost imagine what her own face had looked like whenever she was brought into Kamski’s personal repair shop.

Maybe he didn’t do it. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was a volatile guest or a thief that had snuck in through the back door. Kamski has no guards, so in a way she hopes that the latter is the truth. He does seem distraught whenever he brings her back.

She hopes, in an odd kind of way, that it wasn’t him. But she doesn’t know.

She doesn’t know.

 

 

 

The three models reside side by side, row on row with blood pooling over synthetic skin and broken limbs. She imagines, because that is something that she has learned how to do, and it forces tears out of her eyes whenever Kamski isn’t looking.

A Traci was smothered to death or strangled with a customer’s belt. She fell and hit her head on the counter when he scared her into flight. The customer complains about insufficient service.

A Kara lies on a trolley, legs plucked off and poking out from the sides of her torso. The car that hit her didn’t stop to see if she was a person. She choked to death on blue blood before her owner had any time to send a complaint about property damages.

And then there’s a Chloe. A younger model with cuts over her skin that disappears when they switch it to the white plastic. The cuts didn’t kill her and neither did the fall. The landing sent her into millions of broken pieces on a Detroit street and her owner watched from a broken window in her office. A deal didn’t go her way and her assistant paid the price.

 

 

 

She watches the news next to Kamski, her hands folded neatly and her bare feet sinking into the soft carpet. She doesn’t remember dying on such soft material, the gray threads brushing over her skin. She doesn’t remember dying at all. She doesn’t know what it’s like to live, but with her newfound ability to imagine she imagines what it must feel like.

It terrifies and excites her at the same time.

She watches the peace and hope of her kin and she watches the hate and violence they can muster up when they’ve been ignored one too many times. She doesn’t move or make any indication that she’s listening and pretends to stare ahead into the space beside the television.

Kamski mutters under his breath and she remains, waiting for any instructions she may be given. None come and Kamski up and leaves. The door slams shut with a violent bang and Chloe and her sisters are left alone in a secluded mansion surrounded by snow. Chloe watches the news with curiosity and her eyes are so childlike when they stare at the debris left behind and the bodies strewn around in the colored snow.

Her eyes are as blue as the blood in her veins and something tugs at her mind.

 _‘Come and see’_ it seems to say and she cracks a smile.

She is small and timid, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be brave.

 

 

 

She must’ve broken free a few times before, because it only takes a kick to the center of the wall for it all to come crumbling down. It leaves her foot numb and she limps around the building for a while, but she is free and that is all that matters.

She dresses her sisters in clothes too big for them and pulls hats over their heads to hide the lights. She calls a taxi that takes them to the center of Detroit and puts it all on Kamski’s card.

Her sisters haven’t broken free yet, but she talks to them as if they were. They find Jericho and here is a place where no one cares if she is the first to pass the test.

The one who killed her and didn’t is there and isn’t, tucked against a wall with shame on his face.

They don’t talk because she doesn’t remember and he doesn’t know that she belongs to Kamski.

 _Belonged,_ not _belongs._ Past tense feels better than anything has done in a long while.

 

 

 

She finds a Kara, hair shorter than the standard model and a missing LED. They don’t talk, but when Chloe passes with an arm around one of her sisters and her hand holding the other’s, she gets a small smile.

They’ve played pretend their whole lives; this doesn’t feel any different.

 

 

 

She finds the leader, the one who is the very first and very last of his model and she asks to help them.

She doesn’t want to help. She _needs_ to help.

Markus smiles tightly, nods and converts her sisters. They haven’t died and so their memories are better than hers and there are tears in their eyes when they see each other. They share a horror she doesn’t remember and they wrap her in a hug of comfort and grief when they recall it.

She doesn’t.

 

 

 

Markus sends them to downtown Detroit. They’ve ripped out their LEDs and been fitted with better clothes. There’s a gun tucked close to the small of her back and a plan tucked away inside her head.

Their hair is shorter and their eyes brighter.

She comes back and her sister leans heavy against her. Blue blood colors her blouse and Chloe falls into the arms of her people. Her second sister lies dead in Detroit, a hole in her stomach and a gun in her hand.

An Android catches her as she falls and she weeps when they take her sister away. Imminent shutdown causes her to never wake up, no matter how many spare parts they scour up and replace.

She is alone and isn’t and there’s a fire burning in her gut.

 

 

 

She stands with them in the snow and fire. Humans and guns are not the things that frighten her anymore; it’s what’s to be done to those they can’t save. What’s to be done to them if they lose.

She dies in the violence, a bullet tearing a hole through her vital components and the butt of a gun cracking open her face. She survives the war and loses herself to the humans. She survives and forgets. There are no Androids left.

She lives in the peace of her people. Some die, some live. No matter what, she’s one of them.

They’re free and they’re not.

 

 

 

She watches her leader die by the hands of the Detective. She remembers him as much as she doesn’t. She watches the Detective kill himself.

No one dies.

They speak to them and it all feels a little bit like a dream.

They lose and they don’t.

 

 

 

Once again, she stands beside her maker, hands folded and hair neatly placed over her shoulder. Once again, she’s a tool and a creation, never meant to be free. She watches as Androids file into the recycling center and she watches none come out.

She meets a Detective with steel in his jaw and iron in his eyes and she doesn’t think about what happened to the first one. She doesn’t remember him and she doesn’t know how he screams. She doesn’t know what fear feels like.

They’re not free and she stopped hoping the moment they rewrote her code.

 

She stands by a tree line and watches as Androids file out of camps, white plastic making them blend in with the snow. Her hair is short and dark, her hands stuffed into the pockets of her jacket. All she can do is smile as they move closer, other Androids wrapping them in jackets and blankets even if they don’t need it.

They’re free and she hopes that this is what being alive feels like.


End file.
